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I like character questionnaires but I don’t do them slavishly. If there are questions where I don’t know the answer and I don’t care, I leave them. However other questions may provoke a stream of thoughts that go off on a tangent and I follow them. I find they are a useful tool (and that is all) when I want to work on a particular character and…[Read more]

Rewriting it has been on the back of my mind. I’ve felt this way about some of my short yarns before, and rewrote them into stories that were published and I’m now proud of. I didn’t think of it as rewriting, more like “extensive revisions,” maybe because that doesn’t sound so daunting as rewriting. That’s probably what I’ll end up doing with the…[Read more]

Doug – if your writing strikes you as ‘amateurish’, it’s probably a good thing; it means that, in the time since you originally wrote the novel you have grown and developed as a writer and are already – subconsciously – aware of it.

It’s very hard to do, but have you considered completely rewriting the story from scratch? It’s something I did…[Read more]

I once tried out a character questionnaire from Emma Darwin’s blog on a principal character of mine, and my answer to seven out of twenty-one questions was ‘Dunno’ and/or ‘Does it really matter?’ Some of the other answers were pretty vague. But while writing the story I never had any difficulty in imagining what she’d say or do.

The character questionnaire. I’m with Richard. I don’t doubt they’re great if you find them useful but for me they are disheartening.

The other ‘favourite’ which sends my spirits groundwards is the implication, sometimes a very thinly-veiled instruction, that creative prose should learn from film or TV. If studying that medium helps fire…[Read more]

Thanks for all your replies! They are refreshing, helpful, and sharpen my perspective on things. They also bring things to mind that I’ve read in the past, like Ray Bradbury’s dashing off the whole first draft with the creative side of his brain, shutting off the editor side until the draft’s finished and cooled off.

Dean Koontz, who describes…[Read more]